Only 27% of industry wafer capacity is used for sub-40nm semiconductors

Apr 10, 2013 07:27 GMT  ·  By

One would think that with all the media coverage received by 40nm, 28nm, 22nm and smaller manufacturing processes, there would be more semiconductors built in such facilities.

IC Insights discovered that this is not the case, and that a surprising amount of the industry's overall manufacturing capacity continues to be used for larger nodes.

For those who need an introduction, capacity is divided into six categories, based on the minimum geometry of the processes used in wafer fabrication (wafers are the format that chips are made in, in bulk).

Thus, we have <40nm; ≥40 - <60nm; ≥60nm - <80nm; ≥80nm - <0.2µ; ≥0.2µ - <0.4µ; ≥0.4µ.

Up to the end of 2012, the DRAM market mostly declined, but the NAND Flash segment did pretty well, and while CPUs didn't do spectacularly, they didn't do badly either, especially not with ARM getting its act together. The same goes for graphics processing units.

As such, we'd have expected nodes of under 40nm to account for more than 27% of wafer production, but IC Insights says this is not the case.

While high-density DRAM did encourage 30nm- to 20nm-class process technologies, and high-end flash memory devices also played their part (20nm- to 10nm-class processes), they and high-performance microprocessors (and advanced ASIC/ASSP/FPGA devices based on 32/38nm and 22nm), still didn't account for even 30%.

Mature processes with “large” feature sizes stayed prominent, with 22% of global capacity dedicated to the ≥80nm - <0.2µ segment.

TSMC, UMC, GlobalFoundries, SMIC, and TowerJazz use it for various integrated circuits, according to customer orders.

Most notably, the >0.4µ category maintains a fairly large share of total capacity, despite being over a decade-and-a-half old.

High-voltage IC products were also a factor, since they need large-geometry process technologies, otherwise they'd not survive the electrical currents passing through them.

In layman terms, this means that no matter how much Samsung, Intel, Toshiba/SanDisk, SK Hynix, and Micron promote their latest and greatest technologies, older-generation processing still dominates the market.

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